


Regret

by Sokorra



Series: 2019 Prompt Collection [9]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alice Cooper Family Problems, Extended Cut, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23638993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sokorra/pseuds/Sokorra
Summary: Alice has a lot of things to regret.
Relationships: Alice Cooper & Betty Cooper, Alice Cooper & Charles Smith, Alice Cooper & Polly Cooper, Alice Cooper/FP Jones II, Alice Cooper/Hal Cooper
Series: 2019 Prompt Collection [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1332982
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Regret

**Author's Note:**

> This is a extended version of a drabble posted in the May collection (9th). Its not too much longer, but there is a change of sentences and such as well.
> 
> Also I should admit I stopped watching after an episode or so in season 3. I've kind of been getting my canon from episode reviews and the like.

_ Mama said _

_ Burn your biographies _

_ Rewrite your history _

_ Light up your wildest dreams _

_ Museum victories, everyday _

_ We wanted everything, wanted everything _

_ Mama said don't give up, it's a little complicated _

_ All tied up, no more love and I'd hate to see you waiting _

**-Panic! At The Disco “High Hopes”**

* * *

She had tried her best to rewrite her own history, to give her children a better start then she ever got. She had changed who she was to fit in with Hal’s friends, with his family. Made herself into the wife and mother he wanted her to be.

It was all for naught.

Her past kept rushing up to kick her in the ass. She tried to push away her childhood, her first born, her first love. Push it all away and just focus on what she was supposed to be now. But her youngest was just like her. She could smell a lie a mile away and would do whatever she could to uncover it. Which is fine and dandy when it's for a newspaper article, less so fine when it's your own life.

She sat in the silent living room, police officers all around her, searching for evidence to keep Hal locked away for a long time. She wondered if they would find anything. She certainly hadn’t seen it coming. Hal had never been violent with her. Manipulative, occasionally verbally abusive, but he had never laid a hand on her. Not before this night. But like everything, that was ruined too, the marks of his fingers still red on her neck.

She had known for awhile that Hal didn’t love her anymore, if he ever did. Especially once she began to slip and reaccept elements of herself he had never approved of. The darker make-up, the sexier clothes. The acceptance of her past in the Southside. She didn't think he had been a killer, had thought the opposite in fact.

But the facts remained. Her husband of nearly twenty years was a murderer. He had nearly killed their neighbor and friend, Fred. He had killed several others including a teenage girl. Alice would never get the sight of Midge pinned to the wall out of her mind. What left her in a stupor though was what he had done to Betty.

After the two girls reached adolescence, they had drifted into one parent’s sphere or the other. Alice had loved her children equally, but she had to admit that before Jason, she had gotten along with Polly the best. Betty was too much like her in some ways. It was why she kept trying to keep Betty in the sphere that Hal had put her. Make it so Betty wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

Hal had adored Betty. Taught her how to work on cars, bragged about her academic achievements to anyone who stopped and listened. And yet, when Hal had snapped it had been Betty he victimized the most. Overhearing Betty’s statement to the police about how long Hal had been mentally abusing her, terrorising her and trying to isolate her, she felt like a failure.

She had tried so hard to protect her daughter that she ended up hurting her instead. And it hadn’t protected her, not when Hal had turned the mental abuse perpetrated by his parents on Alice and Betty. It had hurt to see Betty so scared of her father, to see her broken because the one person she had always thought she could trust was the one she couldn’t.

She wished she could turn back time, but at the same time she couldn’t. She regretted lying about Charles, regretted her relationship with Hal. Regretted putting her eldest up for adoption and never telling her younger two about him. She couldn’t however regret her daughters. She loved them dearly. She didn’t know what she could do to repair what she had broken in hopes of protecting them but she would have to try.

  
  



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